Friday, May 16, 2008

I looove french fries. Unfortunately, my double chin and muffin top do not. These potato wedges are usually good enough to satisfy that french fry craving when I get it, and is much healthier, and pretty easy too!

Look what I let happen to my potatoes. How embarassing!I had a whole bag (10 pounds), untouched, all with some monstrous sprouts. Oops. Normally I just give the potatoes a good scrub and leave the skin on, but this time, I had to peel them. I peeled them down a few extra layers to get down under the sprouts, and then the potatoes were as good as new! After peeling them, I sliced, seasoned and baked all 10 pounds. We ate what we wanted, then I layed the rest in a single layer on a cooling rack, froze them, and then transferred them to a plastic storage ziploc baggy to be rebaked and enjoyed at a later date.Ingredients:- Potatoes - Seasoned salt*- Oil (optional)* You can season it with anything you want. Garlic powder, onion salt, etc

Method:- Peel or scrub the potatoes, then cut into wedges. I actually don't cut them into real "wedges". Instead, I cut them in half, then cut them into thin slices. The thinner the slices, the faster they cook, and the crispier they will potentially be. As you can see here, I sliced a few so thin that they turned out like those fancy kettle potato chips! (Hence my title of "Accidental potato chip") Crispy and delicious. Next time I might slice all of them that thin and make potato chips instead!- (Optional) After cutting, you can toss them in a bit of oil and seasoning. I was being super stingy with the oil because I was trying to make them as healthy as possible. I even did a few batches with no oil at all and found that they were still tasty and still crisped up nicely, so oil is actually completely optional.- Lay out the wedges on a silpat or parchment paper lined baking sheet in a single layer. If you want (especially if you skipped the previous step and didn't use any oil), you can sprinkle on additional seasoning now.- Put it into a 450deg oven until browned and crisped to the consistency of your preference. The timing will also depend on how thin you cut your wedges. Mine were pretty thin and took maybe 25-30 minutes. You can probably also precook them in the microwave for a bit to cut down on baking time, but I didn't try this.- (Optional) If you want, after one side is done, you can flip them to get both sides cripsy, but I'm too lazy for that and felt like they were good enough with only one side toasty (I'm always looking for shortcuts).- Serve plain, or with a dipping sauce of your choice (a nice aoli would probably be good) or as a side to your main dish. When it's just me and the hubz, I just bring the baking pan straight to the table and we eat them off of that =)

* The picture above is the baked potato wedges with frozen corn that was heated in the microwave and tossed with a squeeze of lemon juice and some seasoned salt and a tri-tip that the hubz marinated and grilled. He won't tell me what he marinated it with, but I do know there was some tequila, lots of brown sugar and some paprika among other things. It was VERY tasty.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I've always made baked potato wedges because I didn't really know how to make french fries any other way. Growing up we always made the frozen ones in the stove, so I just assumed that was how it was done. For years I thought the only way to make real french fries required a deep fryer.